Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use it for our small and medium businesses, specifically for data collection. We also use it for network mapping.

It's super helpful in the sense that you can look at the network and it shows you a graphical representation, so you know exactly how things are connected. It helps us stay more organized and more up-to-speed on what is in our clients' networks.

It helps keep device inventories up to date. The amount of data you get from it, whether it's network maps or the overall client information, helps you to solve tickets. We have two tiers for our tickets and we have a NOC team that assists us as well. That is how we run the business and the simpler tickets can be handled by the junior engineers.

Also, its ability to visualize network mapping and topology works extremely well. It's very comparable to SolarWinds, which is what I used in a previous position.

The whole troubleshooting process is made easier, and automation is part of that troubleshooting. And its automation has made us more available because it's enabling us to cut down on the time that it takes to resolve a help desk ticket.

We have absolutely seen a decrease in MTTR, thanks to the amount of data and the network maps. If an engineer is looking at a particular client location, they're able to ascertain, fairly quickly, where devices are located and how everything is connected. It just makes the whole troubleshooting process much simpler.

The data collection, as a whole, is valuable. 

The reports seem to be really comprehensive as well. There's a lot of information in terms of the make and model of a specific piece of hardware, IP address, subnets that a device is located on, and network map. It's a single, integrated platform and that is very important because the more tools that you can build into one product suite, the easier it is for your engineering staff to learn it.

It's extremely simple to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. Anybody with just a general IT background would be able to use it without a problem. This aspect of the solution is extremely important. As we're training new people, it's nice to have tools that are simple to use yet powerful enough to give you insight into your client's network. It would be a great tool for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because there are so many built-in features and you get so much information out of Auvik.

Nothing really stands out in terms of a lack. If you want to be nit-picky, I don't know that there are any remote tools for directly connecting to workstations through Auvik. If there is, I have not used them, so adding a remote tool would be helpful.

I started with my current company about three months ago and that's how long I've had experience in Auvik.

It's extremely stable. I haven't had any issues at all. It seems rock-solid.

We have it deployed across at least 30 clients' systems, so it's definitely a scalable solution.

I have not had to call technical support yet because the product is fairly simple and straightforward.

The ROI would be high. Although I don't handle any of the billing our company receives, from a technical aspect, there is a lot of value from Auvik. I couldn't tell you how long it took to implement because I wasn't around for that, but the usefulness that I get out of Auvik is obvious.

I don't know what we pay for Auvik. But whatever the price is, it's worth it because we're getting a lot of value from it for that price.

In terms of technical insight, if you're looking for good insight into your client's environment, Auvik is a great solution.

Auvik has definitely impressed me. It seems like it's very lightweight, yet it gives you a lot of features.

We are an MSP. We've got about 500 clients. So, multitenancy is pretty important to us. We're only interested in monitoring and managing network devices, and we define that as switches, routers, access points, and ESX hosts. Even though some of the things that we traditionally consider to be a computer—such as a laptop, a workstation, or a server—appear in Auvik, we do not do any management of them there.

The RMM platform that we're currently using is wonderful when it comes to servers, laptops, desktops, and all that, but it is absolutely horrible for properly detecting or identifying a network device. In other words, SNMP to properly identify a device flat out did not work and does not work in our other solution. Auvik fills that gap and does a pretty good job when it comes to that. We have always used multiple applications, and it comes down to finding out what the strengths are of a particular application. Auvik does a great job when it comes to networking devices, but we couldn't do nearly as much as what we do for servers and workstations. So, we use it according to its strengths and our other tools according to theirs.

Auvik is a SaaS-only product. There is no on-prem version. There are some definite pros and cons to it. Having to rely on someone else to handle all of the security aspects of something that's SaaS, especially in today's world, can be a little bit nerve-racking. When it is on-prem, you've got full control of ingress and egress. You can lock down the firewall and do all of that good stuff, but at the same time, not having to mess with all of the infrastructure and the things that are required to make a product function is pretty valuable. So, we don't have to worry about storage space, server speed, etc.

It provides a single pane of glass, which is very important. We service around 20,000 endpoints, and they include network devices and computing devices. The fewer places our technicians have to go to get information or address an issue, the better it is.

It has definitely given us a much better inventory of the devices that are on client networks. It has also got a fairly decent API integration with other products. We also make use of Meraki products, and through the API, we're able to pull those and all of their data into Auvik.

It is very good for visualizing the network mapping/topology. The network map and visualization of what's going on are really good. For somebody who is not a network engineer but needs to troubleshoot something, it is invaluable. If they're on call and it is the middle of the night, being able to look and see whether there is a switch loop or something weird going on is invaluable.

It is very intuitive in terms of network visualization. It is almost like an org chart. You can see the ingress point at the very top, and then you can see what's connected to other things. It visually flows very nicely from top to bottom to give you a quick idea of where things are.

It has reduced the visibility of our IT team in a positive sense. We like our techs to be able to work under the hood and not disrupt clients, and it definitely provides a lot of the right remote tools that are needed to go in and address issues or provide updates, firmware, and things like that, but visibility for us is really not a key. As an MSP, we do have a number of ways to provide evidence of the value that we bring and the work we have been doing under the hood, such as the number of patches that have been successfully applied and things like that. 

It does a very good job of keeping device inventories up-to-date. It helps our teams focus on high-value tasks, which goes back to the initial configuration of determining which alerts are high priority and which ones are just standard response and maintenance. They were very easy to configure.

Auvik keeping our device inventories up-to-date has saved us time in a huge way. A part of the value that we provide is that we help our clients develop a five-year tech plan so that they can start to budget. Having an up-to-date and accurate inventory of all of those network devices feeds into those reports through our own automation on the backend. So, it is very valuable.

It is a combination. The discovery portion of it is extremely valuable. It allows us to get a good inventory of what is actually on a client's network. You can turn on TrafficInsights, which is basically a NetFlow feature, for troubleshooting. It allows you to get more detailed information on what's going on with a particular device. So, you could determine why a client is complaining that the internet is slow at 1:00 p.m. every day.

Its interface is very sluggish, and that's probably its biggest impediment. 

It is easy to set up. However, with the wizard-like setup, the choices are lacking. So, there is a lot more that we feel like we could be doing. If it is outside of their pre-configured monitors, you start getting into a level of difficulty.

I have been using this solution for close to three years.

It is very stable. There is sluggishness in the interface, but it is rock-solid.

There could be some potential problems with scalability. We took on a client not too long ago that was fairly close to enterprise-level. We were forced to break them up into different geographic sites so that the web interface would present smaller chunks at a time. That was because it simply fell to its knees if you tried to open up the full site for this particular client. It was just too much for the interface to handle, and that was definitely a negative because it would've been really advantageous for us to see the full network map as opposed to seeing only small pieces of it.

They do a solid job.

Positive

We used to use PacketTrap, and it had basically gone end of life. It had a lot of good features. It was an older product. There was a one-time payment upfront for it, and there were no recurring fees. Those were the days, and those days have gone. Because PacketTrap was the end of life, we were forced to go for something to take care of our clients.

Switching to Auvik hasn't saved us any time. It also hasn't reduced our mean time to resolution (MTTR). That's because the product we had before was solid. It had just aged and had to be replaced.

It is easy to set up. 

We have seen time-to-value with Auvik. Despite the sluggishness of the interface, it has definitely provided a significant amount of value for us.

Its pricing is definitely competitive with everything else that's out there. If somebody has not shopped for a product like Auvik for a while, there's probably going to be some sticker shock because it is not cheap, but that's true for all the products that we looked at.

Its pricing is fair based on what I've seen for everything else that's out there in the market. They're certainly not looking to gouge people. For whatever reason, network management products are just expensive. Before this, we were using a product for which we had paid a one-time payment upfront. We had paid for it and bought it for years and years. There was no additional cost for us. So, we definitely suffered from sticker shock when we started shopping around.

There were quite a few. We looked at around seven different top-level products. We did product reviews for around a year. We were looking for something that was the best fit for how we tend to do business, and Auvik came at the top.

We have a checklist that we go through when we're evaluating a product, which includes:

• Things that are important to us and are required in a product
• Its integration with our other systems

A good example is that we use ConnectWise Manage for our ticketing system. So, it has to have full integration with that. We have multiple teams that handle different verticals, and each one of those teams has its own board. A lot of the products that we evaluated claimed to have good integration with ConnectWise Manage, but when we were really getting into the nitty-gritty of the evaluation, we came to find out that they could only send tickets to one single board. That was a deal killer for us right there.

Having a good, robust API is also very important to us. Again, some products would claim that they had a good API. We would go in and research it only to find out that you could get the minimal amount of information possible, which is a no for us. There is an API, but it is not useful.

Ease of setup is extremely important to us. Some of the products were very complex to go in and set up and configure. In addition, not all products provided the ability to set certain rules that would be global at the top of our hierarchy so they would automatically be applied to all clients below. Fortunately, Auvik has that, and we were able to make really good use of that hierarchy and inheritance to our advantage.

I would advise negotiating as hard as you can on price per agent because that did help us do a fair amount of pre-planning. This would have been true for any of the solutions that we looked at. You need to know how you plan on grouping your clients, or how you plan on organizing. Knowing how that structure is going to flow makes a huge difference in your onboarding time.

It hasn't helped us reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. There is almost no automation. It is great at learning. It is great at visualization and things like that, but there is no automation in there. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There are areas where it could do better, but all things considered, it is a good, solid product.

Our primary use case is to have a monitoring solution for our managed service clients. That was something we were offering, but we weren't really doing well on that front, in terms of having a proactive monitoring solution. That was the primary pain point we were trying to fix.

The main benefit is that we are able to offer better proactive support. Previously, we would deploy a lot of Meraki firewalls and we wouldn't really have proactive support on that. Meraki only offers email alerting, so alerts would come in by email and we wouldn't see them and we'd have to devise other means. With Auvik, we provide a quicker turnaround time for network issues. 

It also enables our lower-tier techs to support everything. Normally, especially on the network side, the lower-tier techs are not as able when it comes to conceptualizing the network and visualizing how it's set up. Auvik's dynamic mapping really helps flesh that out. Even less-technically-oriented clients are able to look at Auvik and understand how their network is functioning, at least at a basic level.

In addition to the overall efficiency improvements due to the proactive alerting and the dynamic mapping, the ease of exporting the data that Auvik provides is a big benefit. There are several options throughout the product that allow you to export your data as an Excel spreadsheet. That means you can get the data that Auvik is using to show you everything. That makes it very easy to do asset inventory or to assess the end-of-life of certain products. It takes a lot of the human involvement out of those processes.

Also, in the past, there was a lot of effort that we'd have to put into keeping assets and inventory up to date, and it was mostly through manual data entry. Auvik cuts a lot of that out. Once you have the network monitoring set up, it has all that data that we would normally have to manually enter into ConnectWise, specifically. Now, that information can carry over automatically. So instead of having to do 10 or 15 clicks, and a bunch of typing for each configuration, you just get the network monitoring set up and set up the inventory syncing, and it happens in a couple of minutes.

By keeping inventories up to date, it saves us time. We heavily utilize ConnectWise configurations for determining contract renewals and we're able to focus more on that aspect, and less on ensuring accurate counts.

Another benefit is the ability to use the connector as a "jump-box "and get into other devices. Previously, we would have to either VPN into a network or get into the network through some other remote means, to troubleshoot and configure. But with Auvik, you have the ability to do quick, one-off troubleshooting commands. A technician can do that. You can also get into all the network devices and computers through Auvik itself.

And given the way it alerts, and how it shows the product, it does produce a lower mean time to resolution. 

Auvik has a dynamic mapping feature. Once you get things loaded, it will show you how everything is connected. It also shows the alerts on that map, making it a very quick and human-readable way to dig into it. Overall, that visualization is really nice, especially the dynamic facet. You don't have to make those connections manually. Auvik does all that automatically. The mapping is very intuitive. The filters have a little learning curve, but even the part that isn't immediately intuitive is not hard to pick it up.

Other useful features are the typical ones, like configuration management. It will keep track of configuration changes on devices and log them.

The alerting is also definitely important. The solution integrates well with ConnectWise Manage and with Opsgenie, which we use for alerting techs after-hours.

It primarily monitors network devices by SNMP and command-line interface. They only charge for network devices, such as wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, switches, and routers, but they'll also grab and monitor printers through SNMP, Windows devices, and Windows hypervisors through WMI credentials.

Auvik also has a really good feature for keeping device inventories up to date. We haven't used it too much, because of the way that we've set it up. Auvik ends up overriding some of the stuff we do internally, but it has a very good way of keeping assets and inventory up to date. The most useful is the ConnectWise integration. It can find certain values, like serial numbers and it will either produce it if it doesn't exist or create a configuration in ConnectWise to match the device. It's really good for keeping all of our products up to date with the information.

I would like to see more extensive syslog capabilities. It can ingest syslogs and I think it can alert based on quantities of messages. You can also look back at some of the messages, but it's not a forensics level syslog.

Also, when it comes to mapping and visualizations, there are some imperfections. If Auvik can't exactly deduce how something is connected, it will show an inferred connection and that makes the map a little messy, but with the preset filters, which you can use to only look at network devices or known connections, you can get all the clutter out of there. Overall, it does a great job, but it would be nice if it had a better export feature. You can export it in a usable format, but it's not on the level of a Visio drawing, if you are trying to produce a network diagram. There's a lot of "in-Auvik" usability, but not necessarily outside of Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for a little over a year.

We have had no issues of note, in terms of stability. There may have been one incident, but it was so minor that we don't even remember it. We have not had outage issues. They're usually pretty good about notifying you about outages and, usually, there are no adverse effects.

The scalability is great. It's designed for an MSP, so adding more clients is extremely easy. We have yet to have an issue. Granted, we're probably not one of their larger deployments. Maybe at scale, when you get bigger, there are some issues, but so far, with our setup, we've never had any issues with scalability.

It is a cloud solution with an on-prem agent that you deploy at each site. We have it deployed for about 30 clients, and there are multiple collectors per client.

So far, the tech support has been great. The only issue is that they have up to a 24-hour turnaround. Typically it's not that long but it's only available during business hours. For any type of issue we have, we can typically wait that long.

There would be an issue if a high-paying client had some sort of emergency situation.

Positive

We were dabbling in PRTG Network Monitor. We were not using it in the same way but we would use it for occasional troubleshooting and gathering the same kind of data. That was what we would recommend before having our own product: to do a PRTG instance, given they give you the first 100 sensors for free, which covers a lot of niche issues.

The initial setup is a straightforward process. After the Auvik code is implemented, it starts to populate network mapping within 10 minutes. Our average time for a full deployment is about an hour and a half.

At a lot of the places where we initially put it in, we didn't have great documentation on what was in that environment or how to get into the devices. If that information is already there, and especially if you have already had a solution in place, it should take less than an hour to get a site completely into Auvik.

There is no maintenance of the solution required at our end. Our support team of about 10 utilizes Auvik pretty frequently in the day-to-day. And client-facing managerial types, like chief information officers, use it quarterly to pull data and information. Other users include anyone else who needs to do troubleshooting or needs information. We have systems and network administrators who occasionally look at it, just to get a feel for the network.

The time-to-value was instantaneous. Once we got the deployment done, it immediately allowed us to better support networks in a proactive manner.

We were looking at a few options but it was hard finding the right balance. Some options had a lot of customization and you could get into the nitty-gritty. LogicMonitor was the primary example, but price-wise it was too much.

The other ones were open source and would have taken too much of a personnel investment. We would have had to dedicate someone to the role of understanding, maintaining, and updating the product.

Auvik hit a really good middle ground in that it had the usability and the features that we needed. And it's updated by them so we just have to use it. It's really an ideal solution given our setup.

Another reason that we picked Auvik was that its pricing is very good. The only non-open-source solution that had better pricing was PRTG, but Auvik had it beat in ease of use. All-around, Auvik has a really great price for the market.

In addition, the cloud aspect of Auvik is extremely useful in that we don't have to worry about downtime. We had a bunch of on-prem appliances at our main site, which wasn't really set up to be a data center. There would often be issues with unexpected downtime that would affect us, client-wide. Having Auvik in the cloud helped us immensely. Not having to worry about the infrastructure or the updates definitely takes a load off of our team. Those are areas where we previously had to put in notable effort.

The deployment of Auvik is much quicker than PRTG, given how PRTG sets up its agents. And once you pay for Auvik, there is no additional cost. SolarWinds is a little more complex and doesn't fit the same niche as Auvik. SolarWinds is more focused on a single enterprise, whereas Auvik is more MSP-focused.

Auvik gives us better insights into network device performance, so we can proactively catch issues before they become serious problems. Auvik also makes us more efficient by providing automated network maps and allowing us to automate low-priority tasks like configuration backups for firewalls and switches. That's a big one. We used to have to do that manually.

The solution's ease of use is essential because our company is split up into different operating groups. We have an IT and network team. This tool allows people who aren't necessarily familiar with firewalls and other IT solutions to get more information at a glance. You don't need to know the ins and outs of a Cisco ASA to figure out what's happening. It also has historical graphs and other features that are helpful for troubleshooting. 

Our customers are distributed and remote, and Auvik helps our onsite engineers support them effectively. It improves our IT support's overall availability because we can detect problems earlier. It's easier to fix something before it's broken completely. 

Auvik's automated network mapping has been helpful because we no longer need to do it manually. It can also monitor router switches, switch stacks, firewalls, and controllers. Auvik has a few other features that are nice to have, like the ESXI monitoring. The ability to monitor printer status, toner level, and aspects like that is also helpful. It fits our need for SNMP monitoring and then some.

I love Auvik's tools for visualizing the network mapping topology. Network visualization is relatively intuitive. It can get cumbersome on a larger network, but it lets you filter the map. If you aren't using any filters and have 1,000 devices, the network is just a bunch of tiny dots that you can't see. At that point, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, so you have to use the filters and zoom in. In my opinion, it's functioning as designed.

I don't like how Auvik handles their multi-site and site terminology compared to other tools. The sites are customers, and the multi-sites are generally partner accounts, but it could also be a customer account with multiple sites underneath it. Their documentation isn't clear on what to use in which scenario. It's up to your best judgment.

Other RMM tools like ConnectWise Automate have customers and sites. Auvik refers to customer accounts as the "multi-site," and the sites underneath are their actual sites unless you have a reason not to set it up that way. Then you can have all the sites under one site. It's confusing. 

I also think Auvik's integration with ConnectWise Manage could use some additional features for excluding certain configuration types. We have that turned off because it's overriding configurations when we don't want it to. I believe the ability to exclude those configuration types is on Auvik's roadmap. 

We've been using Auvik for about a year.

I don't need to contact support often, so that's a good performance indicator. I haven't had to troubleshoot it since the initial deployments. Usually, it's something like a particular device that doesn't have something enabled. 

Auvik is suitable for most MSP use cases depending on the size and maturity of the MSP. It's an excellent fit for the average MSP. I manage 60 environments with 412 devices. The device coverage varies. 

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I can't complain. They were able to fix my issues whenever I had them. I never had any long-standing tickets. 

In the past, we were primarily a ConnectWise shop. Automate does network mapping and SNMP monitoring, but it leaves a lot to be desired and requires a lot of manual configuration. 

We started looking into tools like Auvik and LogicMonitor. Ultimately, we went with Auvik because we felt like it was a good fit. The price was right, and it had all the features that we needed. We weren't using ConnectWise Automate's probe functionality often because there was too much setup involved. I would say it's more akin to us coming from nothing to something.

Auvik is relatively easy to use and deploy. If you're doing it as a Windows service, you can deploy the collector in under five minutes, but setting it up on a virtual machine might take around an hour. After you set it up, you need to configure it to scan the different subnets. 

You have to supply credentials and set the devices up to be monitored. It's reasonably straightforward. If we're deploying it for a net-new customer, we can usually get it done in an afternoon, depending on the customer size. Everything works out of the box, but we needed to set up integration with tools like Manage, ITGlue, and Opsgenie.

It's somewhat hard to estimate the onboarding time because we did it for us first as the MSP, then we onboarded many customers within the first month. It depends on the size of the customer, but it took about six hours.

There's a lot of work to do in the beginning. You have to fine-tune the alerts, which are slightly noisy when you first set it up. That part took a couple of months. We were starting from a blank slate because it was a new solution. We left the default settings and then adjusted them as we went along. It was a little bit of work spread out over a couple of months as we figured out what we did and didn't need.

After that, we didn't need to do much to maintain the tool. You have to check every time you add a new device to ensure it can be scanned. However, if configured correctly, the device will show up automatically when it scans again. 

We just did the onboarding through Auvik.

I don't have metrics about the return on investment, but Auvik's SaaS model saves us the cost and hassle of maintaining the infrastructure to host the solution. Auvik's team handles the security, so we're not paying somebody to manage it. 

That's the big advantage over an on-prem solution because then you have to dedicate resources to management. We only need to manage the configuration of the SaaS solution. We started to see value from the solution as soon as we deployed it because it met an immediate need. We were searching for a solution to proactively monitor networks. Auvik satisfied that need and more.

Auvik is worth every penny. I thought it was fairly priced compared to tools like LogicMonitor, which are a lot more expensive. It's reasonably priced for the market.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. Before deploying Auvik, you should check to ensure it integrates with all your current solutions, including your RMM, documentation tools, and PSA. That's crucial because it's automating inventory and configuration updates. It integrates with ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, ITGlue, Opsgenie, and Meraki, but I'm unsure which solutions are incompatible. 

We initially got Auvik to monitor our network devices and equipment mainly for outages and that sort of issue. We have integrated its alert system and email-to-text solution from a local New Zealand telecommunications provider so that our IT staff can get text alerts to their phones. It's quite handy because you're not constantly monitoring your email. So for our different alerts, we get texts now as well as part of that. It might be on the weekend or something like that, and you're not sitting there monitoring your emails, so texts are a bit easier for our on-call IT person to get a text, and then they can check out what's going on.

One of Auvik's services we use is TrafficInsights. It's reasonably new and wasn't around when we first got it. We can feed all the logs into there to see what connections are going and where things are connecting to the environment. It's pretty useful from a security perspective. For example, you can search and see when a specific IP address might have come into your environment if you need it to do an audit or a review. We generally use it for audits or checking where certain things are connecting from around the world. It's a good security feature we can use when we're worried about a device talking to a particular IP address. We can see how long it may have been talking to that. We haven't actually used it for network bandwidth as such.

Auvik also acts as a config register, connecting and pulling the configurations of switches. It's good to have that stored there. If we need to restore or roll back to a particular config, those are saved somewhere else in addition to saving it manually before we make changes.

Auvik has definitely saved us time. You don't have to go to a room somewhere and figure out what's under what. It's scanned, so it shows you everything, including what interfaces are hooked into what devices. If you didn't have that, you'd need to go into a room to look at a fizzled connection and find where it plugs into. Auvik has decreased our average time-to-resolution. For example, if we have an internet outage in our office. In that case, it shows that an internet connection has gone offline and tells us when we've got a failover internet circuit with different providers. 

In the past, we wouldn't have even been notified if we swapped over to one of the other internet connections. When troubleshooting, we know right away when something isn't working or hasn't come up online. We can see which connection is active or current and which is offline. I can't say precisely how much time we've saved using Auvik, but from a year's perspective, I've probably saved a couple of weeks' worth of time. It's reduced the amount of time I spend manually performing tasks like documentation, mapping things out, and troubleshooting. Auvik's features help us address issues before they become a problem for our users. For example, we have a resource usage alert that pops up when there's a sudden increase so we can jump on it. We can stop a non-essential service from taking up a lot of resources and could potentially freeze the server or device. It saves a lot of time addressing the issue after the fact while preventing potential impacts and outages.

It includes automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups for most things, including most generic Cisco functionalities. These have also saved us time. Before I joined the company, they had a separate service for that. They were paying for something else on top of other solutions. Having that all in the one system saves time as well. You don't have to worry about doing it manually. When we make changes to devices, it automatically rolls over to the next one. You can have a log of the dates and times when it changed, and you can set up notifications for when the configuration changes. You can investigate if it changes when it shouldn't have. Without that, you wouldn't even know it has changed without looking at it, but then I don't think you would anyway.

Our team is pretty small. We only have a small IT shop within our business, but we still have our services with Auvik. It makes it easier for them to fix problems quickly without trolling around and finding other documentation. They can jump in there and see the alerts on that map, giving a bit more information. It saves the rest of the team from constantly having to look at the networking.

Auvik is easy to use and provides us with an abundance of information. It can show what devices are connected to the network and the specific interface that it's connected to, saving us a lot of time. It's helpful if you're trying to troubleshoot and the documentation isn't a hundred percent up to date, like if you take over from someone else, and there's no documentation about how a specific device connects. If it's in Auvik and the network is set up, you can jump in there and find what it's connected to. It even maps it out for you in a pretty little diagram at the top. 

It's comprehensive. You load up a network, and it picks up pretty much everything. That makes it easier to use without having to do too much pumping. In terms of discovery, we only use it for certain things, such as our network gear and our servers. It picks up everything. You do have to do a bit of filtering and some tie-up to make sure you're not seeing stuff you don't want for your specific use case, but that comes down to what different people use it.

Auvik is constantly scanning automatically in the background, and if there's a new device in the network, it'll pick it up. You have to make sure that you have credentials or the right port sector so it can pull the correct information. It may be able to see the device, but it may not necessarily get the information from it.

TrafficInsights has helped us identify and troubleshoot performance issues. When we're doing maintenance, you can monitor it live and ensure that the performance isn't being affected too much. If it is, we can pause and decide to reschedule when there's not so much going on. With TrafficInsights, we can view the information and do something with it. In the past, we couldn't easily find that information. We'd have to dig through individual policies or logs, like on a firewall, for example, whereas it's now all in one place. That made it easier to be able to view that rather than clicking and moving between multiple places.

Auvik could have better compatibility with more devices. The devices that we're using are essential within our network infrastructure. It would be great to access the full range of features that some of the other ones do, such as the device configuration backups and the configuration change alert. But there are always new devices coming out, so they have to work through getting the compatibility in the first place.

It makes too many attempts to connect to devices when it's online. You want real-time alerting and that sort of thing, so it has a lot of active connections going on behind the scenes. It creates quite a bit of talk on the network when it's connecting to a device. When it's trying to connect to one for the first time, it tries all the credentials you have saved within your credential library, and that isn't always ideal. If you're on the device, you can see that there have been a lot of failed login attempts because it's just trying another credential that it shouldn't use.

We've been using Auvik for about a year and a half.

When we need Auvik, it's there. There is quite a lot of maintenance that goes on behind the scenes. We get alerts when Auvik is unavailable due to maintenance, but that's also a good thing in cybersecurity threat environments these days. Being in IT ourselves, we know how important that is. 

It's simple to scale up because you can add a whole network or office environment into it quickly. If you don't need it anymore, you can delete it. It's very scalable.

I would rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I've opened a couple of support tickets when we've needed certain things. They respond pretty quickly. We've also had chats with them throughout the setup process. The account managers have helped us get questions answered or pointed us in the right direction.

Positive

Before I joined the company, they had a PRTG system, which is similar in terms of the overall goal. But I had Auvik, which is a lot easier. It's all there. As long as you've got the network and a user to connect to something, then you're basically on your way, and you don't need to do much with the collectors either, which is the thing that talks and you install it and make sure it can talk to the right places on the network. You pretty much let it do its own thing. 

Ease of use and functionality were probably the main things that made us switch. PRTG is a product that requires you to set up a lot of things manually. There wasn't specific device compatibility. It was just standards, whether it was the way a device connected or the protocols through which it is connected to the device to pull the information. Auvik sets things up and has specific compatibilities with devices and a much nicer view to see the information that the old product didn't have.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward. It has decent documentation and specific instructions on how to configure it to work with compatible devices. You're not trying to follow some document for a completely different device and apply it to your device. There's lots of information to use to help you with that configuration process as well.

I can't say precisely how long it took to set up, but you can get a whole network mapped out pretty quickly. I've set up a few offices around the country. It took me a couple of hours to get everything fully monitored and plug the information in. To set it up, all you do is check a network, scan, and get some credentials. That takes less than an hour. Then you're just waiting for the information to start going in. With other products, you sometimes don't even know where to start, to be honest. If I were trying to do the same thing on another solution, I might end up spending an extra day on it for the same sort of setup, whether that's a whole office environment or setting it up from scratch.

We did the implementation ourselves. In the first year, there was a local reseller who sold it to us, but they didn't help us implement it. We have a four-person team for everything, so we take turns doing different things. In terms of maintenance, there isn't a lot we need to do on our side. Once we've got it set up and doing what we need, then there isn't a considerable amount. The only time we need to perform any maintenance is when we're setting up new equipment. On the other side, Auvik does its maintenance. So we'll get emails about them completing maintenance and the service availability and that sort of thing.

It's hard for me to estimate the return because I don't know what that service costs, but Auvik has replaced the separate service we formerly used for device configuration as well as our old network monitoring solution. I don't know the difference in cost between Auvik and our old solution, but Auvik saves a lot of time, and time is money. 

I'd say Auvik's price is reasonable. I don't know how much we paid for the old one, so I can't compare the two. But I think it's a good value, considering all the time saved and the information you can get from it. The license is billed according to the number of network devices. It bills you based on a few specific types of devices, like switches, routers, and other network devices. We're not even using all of our device allotment at the moment. I think Windows servers and machines and that sort of thing aren't counted as part of that licensing. We aren't charged for servers, I believe. We have a virtual environment, so all of our servers and virtual machines within that aren't part of that licensing scheme.

I think they were looking at about three solutions at the same time. They did a few trials a couple of years back. I can't remember which ones. I think there was a Solomon solution. They decided to go with Auvik because of all the information it displays and the ease of use. 

I'd probably give Auvik an eight out of 10 at the moment. We're still waiting for them to become compatible with all of our devices. If they had that compatibility, I'd probably rate it nine or 10. For those thinking about adopting Auvik, I would say go for it. 

My advice is to put time into setting up the alerts because that's one of the best parts about it. If you have those alerts set up, it's going to save you a lot of time. You don't even need to go into Auvik to investigate. With that notification, the process comes a behind-the-scenes method for resolving those alerts. You should have a plan so your IT team knows what to do when one of those alerts is triggered.

I use Auvik every day for everything. I can remote-terminal in, meaning I can be anywhere and jump in from my phone and make any changes I need to on switches.

We have some pretty large energy overhaul stuff going on right now. They're changing out all of our lights and adding big solar panels to all the parking lots at all of our school sites. It's nice being able to use Auvik to jump into those switches and change the VLANs when they need different sensors put in. Having that service is invaluable.

Auvik lets us know about problems before others find them. There have been some instances where I didn't set up an alert correctly, but as soon as I fixed it, it started giving us a heads-up before we got phone calls about the issue. That's the biggest advantage of having it. We don't get those calls nearly as often anymore.

The automation of network mapping frees up my time. I'm the sole network guy. We have some technicians that intermittently have an interest in networking. I have given them basic access to it so they can get in and see the maps, and they get the alerts too, so that they know what is happening at their assigned sites. Suppose a camera is down somewhere. They can go into Auvik because I have it set to hold devices for 10 days. They can see where it was connected and we can check the switch and see what the issue is.

Auvik also updates the maps almost instantly. Within about 30 seconds they're updated.

And in terms of reducing MTTR, we went from having nothing to having something. We would sometimes go a week or a month without knowing about an issue. I am able to track things down faster and implement solutions for things that I would otherwise have had no idea were even a problem in the first place.

The solution provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups, as well. As soon as it starts scanning, it copies the running config on all the network hardware. I'm able to go in and restore them if I need to, but there's no setup for that feature. That has saved us time, absolutely. You can use that same panel to check differences. For example, when there's a configuration update, you can pull the backup and the current running, and run them together and it will highlight any differences.

The most valuable features of Auvik are the alerting and monitoring. Those functions mean it easily more than pays for itself. I have it integrated with Slack with multiple channels set up for our IT office. When just about any part goes down that I have assigned in the alerting portion, it will let the right people know within minutes.

It's also straightforward to use. That was one of the reasons I went with Auvik. It has a little link tree on the left side and you can pretty much navigate through the whole system. It's MSP software. Each of our school sites is set up as if it were a separate client. Each has its own webpage, and I can drop down the menu on the left and change to any school site to see its whole page. It's as straightforward as it gets.

The network discovery capabilities are pretty good. You do have to go in and allot permissions to scan separate subnets. If someone doesn't know what they're doing, they're not going to know how to get it to discover the networks. As long as you know what subnets you're supposed to be scanning, it's as easy as clicking a checkbox and hitting "Scan."

It would be cool if they came out with an app, but running the browser isn't bad.

I've been using Auvik for just over a year.

The stability is great. They're really consistent in sending out notifications about any maintenance windows or updates that they're rolling out. 

The only time I've had a false positive from Auvik is when our VM has gone down, the one that's running the collector. That will cause a bunch of things to pop off here and there. But I've cleaned that up on our end.

There was recently an issue with logging in, but they were on top of it within minutes and then they had a whole status web page about it. I can't complain at all about the stability.

Because it runs from a VM collector and it's fast, I could add another site if I wanted to and it would take me minutes.

In terms of increasing our usage of Auvik, we have a site that's running from a different ISP and I'm having issues remotely managing it. As soon as I'm able to get that straightened out, I'll be adding that entire site to our service.

Their technical support is awesome. They're proactive. If there's anything going on, they let me know by sending me emails. And if I ever need to hit them up, they're super quick. We have a designated rep and she's pretty responsive.

They recently added an idea portal. If I come across an idea or something that I want them to add in, I can throw it in there. Users then up-vote or down-vote ideas and Auvik chooses to implement them or not after that.

Positive

We had SolarWinds and then something happened to our database, internally, that we were using to manage it. We then went to having no monitoring at all for about two years. When I took over, we got with Auvik. So technically, we replaced all of SolarWinds' services with Auvik.

The setup was really straightforward. When we were doing the proof of concept, I went through their resources and got their certification by following their courses. And I pretty much did the entire deployment by myself, with a little help from their sales rep. But it was super straightforward. It took about 10 minutes.

The setup was super easy compared to others that I've done. With Auvik you're just putting a service on a VM. Depending on how large your network is you might need more VMs or more services running, but that's literally it.

And as a cloud-based solution it requires zero maintenance.

The time to value is great. We were up and running within an afternoon.

They charge for switches and some networking hardware, but everything else is free. In our environment there are a lot of things that we aren't billed for by Auvik. We're almost one-for-one on students. APs and cameras are shown by IP address in Auvik. It doesn't tell you exactly what that device is, but it does tell you there's something there and where it's connected in the maps. You can monitor any workstation using the service. If you can name them it makes it a lot easier to keep track of them. Intercom systems are included as well. All of those devices are not billed and we have thousands and thousands of those kinds of devices.

We had to look at other options. We checked out SolarWinds and we also evaluated NinjaRMM and PRTG. The latter teamed up with NetBrain and together they do network automation ticketing.

SolarWinds and NinjaRMM were significantly more expensive, although they did do more. But they were more server-related and covered more of that end. Auvik is more network-centric and checked more boxes, in terms of what I was looking for, than the others.

Give Auvik a shot. Do the demo. It doesn't take long to do the proof of concept. And during the proof of concept they give you access to their resources so you can go in and do that Auvik certification. The most important part of that is being able to go through all of their material and really see what they're capable of. During the demo you can dig deep.

I love it. I use it every day, multiple times a day.

It gives me an overall idea of our network. It shows me where things are at. It tells me about devices being down, e.g., printers. I also use it to see web usage, e.g., what sites people are going to. It has a lot of uses. I check to see the overall network topology, when things go down, or whenever I get alerts from Auvik.

I use the reporting part of it. Every day, I take a look at the reports every day.

We are using the latest version.

It makes it simpler and easier for me, as an IT person, to manage my network.

The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. This has made our operations easier, simpler, and faster.

As things change on a network, Auvik detects that and automatically changes based on those changes. It makes things a lot easier. You don't have to figure it out by mapping it out on a paper, etc. You can just go there and see how things are connected. So, it definitely helps.

When the systems go down, Auvik is a pretty useful tool. It lets me know ahead of time that I have an issue somewhere.

It is pretty easy to use. It kind of deploys itself. You put some passwords in there and it just kind of spiders out into your network, testing everything. 

Its network discovery capabilities are pretty good. It kind of spiders out and detects pretty much everything on the network, e.g., things that we are using and not using anymore. Its network discovery capabilities allow me to detect these things so I can track them down and shut them off.

The reporting needs a little bit of improvement. Sometimes, I get too many reports. Or, I don't get reports when I should be getting reports. I don't know if this is Auvik's fault or the devices that the reporting is coming from, but I have noticed there have been some discrepancies.

I have been using Auvik for five months.

I have had no issues with its stability.

I get emails letting me know that Auvik will be down for maintenance or updates. No maintenance is required.

Our environment is not very large. I am the only user of it.

I haven't needed to use the technical support.

We didn't previously have anything in place. We looked for a solution because we had nothing in place for network topology and reporting on systems being up and down as well as having the reporting on other things that Auvik does.

The initial setup was a little complex.

The deployment took four sessions, which were an hour long each.

Auvik suggested that we put it on a relay server, then we took it from there.

I did need some help from Auvik specialists. With some of the switches, I needed to get them in the device and reporting correctly. There were some problems, so a specialist had to get on and help me configure it.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution by 50%.

I find Auvik kind of invaluable. It wasn't that expensive and did provide me with a lot of information. So, it is pretty beneficial.

We have licenses per year. It is on a network device, so we pay for switches and firewalls. Everything else is included, e.g., computers, access points, and printers.

Auvik offers a trial period. I recommend taking advantage of that and seeing if it works for your environment.

I looked at competitors. Other providers had multiple systems. I just wanted a single system to do everything. So, Auvik was an all-in-one package.

The TrafficInsights feature shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. I use it to see what sites people are going on and how to block certain things, like social media. Though, it is not that important to us, because we don't have an issue with our bandwidth. So, if we had an issue with our bandwidth, I would have to monitor it more, but we don't at the present time.

Auvik is very useful. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

I'm one of the biggest Auvik fans out there. I have used it personally, and I have brought it to every single company since 2015 as a product offering or for the internal use case. I currently own a firm, and I am yet to talk with Auvik. When the time comes, I will absolutely be doing its implementation for my company, and I will be offering Auvik to my customers.

I did its implementation for a company in the November of the last year. NetFlow was one of the biggest use cases, and it was for monitoring the type of traffic inside the network. We were also able to do a lot of Syslogging, and with one pane of glass, we were able to remote into the various routers and switches that we had.

It was deployed via Windows services and not as a virtual box inside VMware, which is probably better. We also had a cloud collection point, which was also a failover in our Chicago environment. I was deployed for five different sites along with the NetFlow application.

Auvik provided one of our clients the ability to see the network in its entirety. We were seamlessly able to implement an encryption deployment because we could see the whole network from a bird's eye view. It was internally implemented, so it didn't really help us in terms of performance, but it improved the productivity of the project on which we were working.

In terms of whether the automation of network mapping enabled junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and freed up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks, as an IT Manager, it has allowed me to delegate tasks. What was nice was that a lot of people were annoyed that Auvik just didn't combine everything, and everything was slow when Auvik did combine the whole map. When we broke it out the way Auvik told us to, which was by the site, it allowed me to actually assign a small networking team of two or three personnel essentially to that specific location. Everybody knew what exact equipment they were responsible for, and then it just trickled down to all of the other systems and processes. This made the communication more effective. We could hand off jobs and shifts at almost a seamless rate. When it came to documentation and password inside of Auvik, I knew and felt that they were secure. It has definitely decreased our mean time to resolution. It improved our overall productivity by at least 20%.

Its TrafficInsights feature shows the network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. Most of the time, I'm able to get a pretty detailed kind of report or visionary on it. This feature is extremely important. From a managerial standpoint, we wanted to know what people were doing. The pandemic was huge for a lot of work for home people, and we wanted to know what our employees were doing on their computers at home. While they were connected to the VPN, Auvik provided us the ability to see whether they were watching Netflix and things like that, or what other type of bandwidth they were taking up. It was very amazing. We were canning people over it, and we were utilizing it to kind of take a temperature of our culture.

The TrafficInsights feature is helpful in showing where your system is experiencing performance issues. When we have a network problem, I'm able to see where and what's causing it. Back in October, we had some sort of network storm on our layer 3 in Chicago, and we were able to pinpoint different types of traffic going on. It was nothing, and packets were coming back at zero bits and different bits, and it was just noise. We were able to figure out that there was a loop somewhere. We had to physically go down and examine it, but without it, we probably would have chased our tails around or spent a lot more money than we did to resolve the issue.

The TrafficInsights feature has helped in improving our network performance. It improved our understanding of the network and what was going on. It helped us utilize other tools that were in place to block traffic, allow different traffic, or redirect different traffic.

It provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. I had to go in and do some configuration myself, but it was very simple. It automatically pulled the configuration from the device, and I could download it from Auvik. It probably saved me a couple of hours a week. At $100 or $200 an hour, it could save you a couple of thousand bucks a year.

It has definitely enabled us to consolidate and integrate other tools. Auvik integrates really well with other tools such as Lucidchart and different PSAs such as ConnectWise. With that, I can just utilize more functions inside these solutions. I don't necessarily have to have my Lucidchart. It integrates well where I don't have to add any more products. It is kind of that last missing link theme. It takes away from having to purchase a Visio chart, individually go and pull network reports, or have a product at each site that does that. It has this overarching big brother side. Not having to spend on these tools has probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 annually in licensing costs. These are the software that you got to get rid of, and they are probably about $10,000 per piece.

NetFlow is probably one of the most valuable features. Since starting with Auvik, and seeing how far it has come, NetFlow has been one of the most valuable features. This feature is important because as a network administrator, you always want to examine what type of traffic is going on. You can limit users from watching Netflix on a route, or you can also pinpoint malicious activity going on in the network. So, I really do find Auvik to be a utility, not only from a network standpoint but also from a security standpoint. It provides a very good security feature in a way even though it is not branded like that.

Towards the actual Auvik side or the networking side, one of the most valuable features is its capability to quickly go out, discover, and have the intelligence to either utilize known usernames and passwords (when it comes to SNMP) or ask for the proper credentials. If they weren't provided, then it provides information about how to go retrieve them. When you examine the whole workflow or compare it to SolarWinds Orion, which got hacked, Auvik blows it out of the water because of this feature. This feature is important because when you're monitoring multiple locations and managing multiple employees, it is important to have that piece fit inside of that business continuity. I like to involve those things in security and business continuity when I am selling, deploying, or implementing it, thus making it the culture behind the product.

Its network discovery capabilities are very impressive. The discovery piece is amazing. I don't know if they have an AI or some type of advanced intelligence inside of their program that helps with the discovery piece. I haven't seen anything that discovers products that well and is able to label them, tag them, and pull as much information about them. I don't know what drives that engine, but I'm just absolutely blown away by it. It is cool.

Its ease of use is great. I was very pleased with how the junior employees, and even a couple of senior employees who had not worked with the product, were able to jump in, learn quickly, and work through the interface.

Some of the automation pieces for discovery still need a little bit more improvement. I wouldn't mind seeing some more security features as that's the world we're driving into. I know Auvik probably wants to try to keep itself separate because that's its brand, but even if they brought on board another brand that was able to plug into them, it would benefit us. It would lower some more network security costs if as a company, they are a one-stop shop. They have already got the network piece going. If they improved in that area and focused a lot on that, they would gain me as a customer, and they would probably gain a lot of others.

I have been using Auvik since 2015. 

I've been pretty impressed with its stability. I've been with Auvik for such a long time, and they've improved over the years. That's why I have nothing bad to say about them. Its stability in 2015 was great, but now with the redundancy and this cloud thing that they've got going, it is even more impressive.

They've improved it in that area a lot. It is scalable now.

In the previous job, we only paid for 20 billable endpoints, but we had more than 100 endpoints. We had three users. My title there was a senior systems architect, and then I had a network engineer under me. Above me was my boss who was the Chief Information Officer. 

If I had to rate its usage on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being eight hours a day and one being twice a week, they would probably fall in the five range. They probably use it four out of five days and for an hour or an hour and a half a day.

Currently, I don't have it as an offering in my own company. We are brand new, and I just opened this firm this year in February. As we get the ground and the ball rolling, we will be an Auvik customer within the next six months for sure.

Their technical support is the best. You can talk to an Auvik support technician about something Cisco-related. They don't have to, but they are very knowledgeable in that technology, which is so impressive. 

I'm glad, and I'm sure that Auvik hires nothing but educated people, which is probably why it's just that much better of an experience. I can talk to them, and they know what I'm talking about. A lot of the things that we talk about are complex things related to the Cisco technology, FortiGate, etc.

In the previous job, we had a third-party firm called Transcendent, and they resold SolarWinds Orion, but it was not good. I replaced it shortly with Auvik after Orion was hacked, and then we integrated their team into the product. We had it all on-prem, but we utilized this hybrid thing that Auvik had. If our on-prem collector went down, we weren't completely blind. We had redundancy built into it.

It makes me so much happier to be an Auvik customer and a champion of the product. I'm really glad that Auvik hasn't been touched like SolarWinds Orion. It gives me the confidence to keep utilizing and selling their products.

Auvik automatically updates the network topology at an interval of approximately 60 seconds, and you can also go in there and forcefully update it. We, however, never really relied on that technology. You could click on a spot, and it was a 50:50 shot if we had to move in and relabel it, which was better than SolarWinds where you get a 10% chance of getting it right. So, you're doing 90% of the configuration in SolarWinds versus having to do 40 to 50% in Auvik. That's why Auvik is better.

It was pretty complex. When you are setting up Auvik, you can set up the collector, which is straightforward. However, when you are trying to set up your router and switches, you have to have at least an associate-level degree in Cisco networking, for example, to understand the commands and the things that you need to do to prepare your router or firewall to work or integrate into the Auvik system. You need somebody who knows networking. When it comes to finding those people, they're expensive. It is probably cheaper to go through Auvik's offering at that point. If you have them on staff, utilize them. So, it is complicated, but it is no fault of their own. Auvik was easy, but they can't really control Cisco or the other people who have their technology.

The deployment probably took about two weeks. In terms of comparing the setup time of Auvik with other solutions, Auvik allowed me to do it from one location and in my chair. For other locations, I probably would have had to travel at least twice with a SolarWinds solution. I would have had to deploy it on physical hardware at that location and then use my Cisco DMVPN to make everything toss, which isn't really all that cool or modern. So, Auvik saves me traveling time and money, and I am able to do it from one location. Such cost savings probably translate to $10,000.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our home office, which was our data center here in Milwaukee, and then to set up a redundant site in Chicago. We discovered there, and then we went by the office and deployed it office by office through discovery. We didn't move to the next office till every piece of equipment was accounted for, labeled, and documented.

I have not used any third-party integrator. I did it myself. I also did all the maintenance, which included server maintenance, different updates, patches, backups, etc.

They weren't like that, but I can tell you that they've made it.

The cost for all the devices that we were billed at in my last job was about $2500 annually. It wasn't much.

It has the most reasonable pricing as compared to any product out there. I can't complain. It is amazing. It allows me to bundle inside the package what I charge customers per user per month. I don't charge them per device anymore. That's not how we do things in the industry. It is per user per month. The way Auvik is charging us allows me to do it. For example, if they charge $250 for a certain number of seats, I'm just going to write the costs onto per user per month. I have a few leftover licenses to use, which allows me to go out and make some more sales and give some freebies at some shows. So, it makes me very flexible. I am very happy with it.

It is billed by network devices. You could choose which billable device you want. What is really nice is that if you don't want one switch to be billable and the other one to be billable, you can do that. You just won't have the features that the billable switch has, which isn't horrible. Sometimes, you don't need that. What I'm really happy about is that Auvik doesn't force things on you and doesn't say, "You have to have all of this," and that's a great business model.

Sometimes, you can get overages if you go over your agreement per device, but they don't try to nickel-and-dime you on it. They're very reasonable, and it is easy to go in and look and see. They harp on it too. They ask you to go in and check and make sure you have what you want because you have this many licenses.

They didn't evaluate any other product.

To anybody utilizing it internally, I would advise going through Auvik directly. You'll pay a little bit more, but you'll have the support as an IT staff unless you want to come through a company like me. Auvik has just recently opened up their company to accept companies that want to utilize it internally. As a consultant with the landscape that I'm looking at right now, I advise Auvik to keep pricing in the same way.

I would advise taking your time and doing your implementation right the first time. You're going to gain more knowledge about your network, and the people coming after you are going to be able to support your network that much easier. 

Its ease of use is great, but I firmly believe that if you don't have experience in networking, you're going to fail. If you don't take the time or pay the money to sit down with Auvik and have them teach you to utilize the tool, you're doing yourself a disservice because of what and how inexpensive it is to get the tool and how valuable it is to have their time to teach you how to utilize the tool. They have an implementation team that will walk you through it. You have to pay for this service separately. I utilized this service once, and I've been able to implement it myself. I would highly recommend that somebody without experience should pay for this service at least once in their career.

It doesn't really help us put out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. That could be because of the customers that I've had. However, Auvik does allow me to pinpoint the problem right away. I may get the alert two minutes later than my customer alerted me, but I'm able to get a fast resolution in place right away. It is easy. So, that's what I'm very happy about.

As a seller of Auvik, the cost-savings that it provides allow me to be more mobile. I don't have to hire as many employees because I can have them sitting in a chair watching a dashboard, which saves cost. If I'm a customer myself, I don't really see cost savings, and it is just another tool for my IT guys to be successful. So, it doesn't really save costs, but at the same time, it has a positive impact on the network.

As a consultant, Auvik has shown me the habits of end-users or IT staff. For example, Auvik has been able to pick up on rogue, small six-port switches that get plugged in somewhere under somebody's desk. I am also able to see the weird things that get plugged in or turned on in the network. I am also able to have conversations, but it is just weird to see how that technology or software translates to the behavior of these people. It is kind of neat.

Its time to value is what it is. There is a cost to everything, and there is really no value when it comes to implementation. Especially with how I am going to have it implemented in my environment, I have to ask somebody with a reasonable amount of knowledge, and he is going to cost me $80,000 to $100,000 a year to go out and implement. It is just a cost, and there is really no way around it.

I would rate Auvik a 10 out of 10.

I do internal IT for a company and I use Auvik for most of my daily tasks as they relate to firewalls, switches, and routing.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly and helps to free up senior-level team members to perform more involved tasks. It can be a key tool in environments where somebody who doesn't have a strong network skillset can go in and see, "Is it good, is it not?" and be able to make a decision on whether it needs to be escalated to me or not.

It also automatically updates network topology. One of the things that I really enjoy doing, when I first get into a new environment with it, is to watch it rebuild the map as it learns in real time. I can see its process and for me, as a very technical guy, that is one of the most entertaining things to watch, as it learns and updates the changes in a network in real time. It saves time maintaining network topology since the tool actually does it automatically. I have a high level of confidence that the information is correct, and it is immediately available. Just last week, I got a call from one of our internal auditors who needed to provide some information. He said, "Yeah, this usually takes a few weeks. Can you provide firmware information and serial numbers?" During our phone call, I was able to get into Auvik, pull the list, get it sent over to him and say, "Here you go. We're done."

Auvik has also decreased our mean time to resolution. Being able to go in and look at what's not broken, very quickly, and get that confirmed, means that I can look at what I actually need to fix. It eliminates a whole bunch of other problems and a whole bunch of checking. It has reduced our MTTR by up to 80 percent in some cases.

And because we've got it triggering PagerDuty alerts, if something problematic really fires off, I will know about it and be in the tool looking at what's going. I can say, "Hey, this is a problem we need to alert," or, "This isn't a problem and we just need to be aware," very quickly.

Another benefit is the TrafficInsights feature which shows network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, and it does it very well. That is a very nice-to-have in my current role because we don't have issues with our network bandwidth. But in other environments that I've been in, where there were issues with bandwidth, it is a very well-put-together tool allowing me to find the answer and say, "This is what our problem is." It enables me to tell the business that we either need to spend more money on bandwidth, or we need to deprioritize a certain type of traffic. It gives that information in a format in which I can give it to somebody who is less technical than me. I can show them the graph and say, "This is what's going on and why."

TrafficInsights helps to show you where your system is experiencing performance issues around capacity and what is the busiest traffic. It can help improve network performance by letting me know exactly what's going on. It lets me see whether it is an application misbehaving, a lack of bandwidth, an upgrade that we need to make, or a configuration. It gives me these choices so that I know for real what's going on. In some cases, people "feel" that something is going on, but this gives me the facts to know what's going on. I would estimate TrafficInsights has improved our network performance by 50 percent.

In multiple environments I've been in, we've been able to eliminate other tools and use Auvik as our single network management solution. In those environments, I've had up to five tools that I have been able to decommission by using Auvik. In that environment where there were so many tools in place, replacing them probably saved $100,000 a year.

Some of the key features that I get out of it are that it is a well-rounded monitoring solution, so I know when something fails—whether it's a device or a service on the device. But it also performs backup, in inventory, of some of the key things to control and manage the network.

And one of the best things about Auvik, and it's why it's one of my go-to products, are the remote access capabilities. Without a VPN and without any other way in, I'm able to get in and work on and troubleshoot my devices through the remote access console. It has multiple options for that and has been very useful and a huge time-saver. That's one of the killer features. It's one of my must-haves and that's why I like it so much.

In addition, for products in this category, Auvik's ease of use is one of the best. It's really built for people like me. I'm heavy into the parts of IT that are not server-related, including routing, switching, firewalls, et cetera, and it is organized for somebody like me. It is the network engineer's toolset. It gives me what I need upfront in a way that I understand well. Auvik speaks my language.

When it comes to its network discovery capabilities, It is the best that can happen. I've used it in multiple environments, and as long as I've got the right starter information, it can go find information in an hour that would otherwise take a person weeks. It's very good and very quick. I've been able to benchmark it against competitive tools and it is way more useful, giving me information that I actually need and can use.

The automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backup capability is one of the key features for me in Auvik. To manage a network, one of my key requirements is to be able to rebuild that network if something catastrophic happens. Having up-to-date backups is a must, and this is a tool that I count on to get that right, and it has always performed as I expect. I am able to very quickly and easily audit that the backups happen and I know that they're there. I can also restore to a previous point with very little hassle, if anything goes wrong. Compared to other backup solutions, it saves me 80 percent in terms of my time.

The logging features could be a little bit better polished, although that aspect is relatively new. It comes in as raw data, with different formats for different vendors. It's not immediately clear to people what's going on with some of that and you have to read through the codes. Some of the higher-end logging solutions, like Splunk, which is very expensive, can parse through it and correlate items better. Improvement to the logging features would be a value-add, but I'm still very happy that it exists.

There are a few edge cases where I have found support for devices to be a little bit lacking. I'm migrating away from Check Point right now and Auvik and Check Point do not get along at all, so it was very troublesome to get those put in place.

Another issue that I know is already in progress, but that will be very nice, is full integration with PagerDuty. I'm using email connectors right now that have a little bit of a lag, so once the APIs are in place between Auvik and PagerDuty, it will give me better alerting when something breaks. I know that's on the roadmap because I've talked to them about it.

Between two different companies, I've been using Auvik for about three years.

The availability is 99 percent. They do have maintenance windows where it's not available. I've been happy with their communication on the maintenance windows and they pick the times very well when it's not going to be available. I realize that everyone needs maintenance, but it works out very well.

I've used this for everything from companies that are in a single building up to a company that had offices in 20 time zones with almost 100 offices, some of them with 1,000 users, and it was able to scale up to that. I've never had worries about how big this can go.

Their technical support is fair to good. There have been a few times where I've had to escalate to somebody higher, when I thought the lower-level person should have understood it, but I've always ended up with a good answer.

The initial setup is straightforward and, as far as the product category is concerned, it's the most straightforward. I've used this in an MSP environment and I've done deployments into close to 30 companies with Auvik and it is, by far, the fastest way to do it for a fresh deployment.

We can get the initial install going in a few hours and we can be confident in the data in a week or two. Comparing that to other tools, it would be an initial deployment of a week or two and two months until we're confident with our data. It has probably reduced the time spent on setup by 90 percent. And when dealing with an MSP, it cuts down a client onboarding by at least a month, which lets revenue start coming in earlier.

The implementation strategy depends on the size of the environment that we're going into, but we usually put in collectors at key locations and first let them do their discovery and see what's out there. Then we'll tune them down so that the collectors are monitoring from the right locations. But we like to get as much data in as possible, initially, and then tune downward.

As a cloud-based solution, it requires just about no maintenance and that's one of the other benefits of Auvik. With other solutions, we have spent more time updating and babysitting the servers and fixing our tools, instead of fixing our environment. That's a major plus.

When I was first evaluating it and we were going through pricing models, I was able to make the case that, for a team of five, this would be better than adding a person to the team when it comes to getting work done.

When I was new in this environment, I was trying to get a lot of stuff together. I brought Auvik as a solution to my supervisor and said, "This is what we used at my last company," and he was familiar with my last company. He viewed them as very good at what they do. I suggested we take a look at Auvik. As soon as he got the pricing during the first sales call around Auvik, he said, "Sold. Well worth that money." They didn't even have to finish the presentation. He saw what was being offered and he also based his decision on the fact that I'd used it before. The cost easily made it worth it in his mind for what it would provide to us.

The pricing is fair for the value and time saved that you get out of it. The larger you go, the more sense it makes per device, because as you hit different pricing tiers, it becomes much more affordable per device.

Auvik is billed by network device. They've got a very clear-cut definition of what is a device and what isn't a device, and that's very convenient. Anything like a server, or a phone, or an access point, is not billed but they are still captured for data, which is very useful. Auvik is very upfront that the solution is not a good server monitoring platform, but it's a fair server monitoring platform and that comes along for free with everything else. My server guys have another system they use for monitoring servers, but they find being able to look at Auvik as well has been a huge value-add.

I have used LogicMonitor, PRTG, the N-central suite, the ManageEngine suite, and the SolarWinds products.

In terms of the differences between those solutions and Auvik, I would summarize them this way: Auvik is a tool built for the network guys, primarily, whereas a lot of other tools are built for the server guys first and then add in network. It's a tool really built for what I care about and it values my time. I'm able to get it put in fast, I'm able to use it fast, and my information is fast. It lets me do more with less.

Definitely go through the proof of concept testing. The results speak for themselves. It's a fully rounded product and everyone I know who has used it has been happy with it.

When you're first deploying it, understand how you need to set up your locations. Otherwise, you're going to end up redoing work. If you're in a larger environment, you need a little bit of knowledge about where things are to be able to put stuff in the right places. If you're small, you can just drop it in and be super-happy with what it gives to you.

Overall, compared to everything else out there, it's a solid 10 out of 10. I haven't found anything that gives me what I need better.

We are a multinational company in almost 55 countries. One of the reasons why we selected Auvik was we wanted to have insights into our networks. Ultimately, we can control them at a central level. Auvik was the best fit because it has:

1. A cloud-based solution using a SaaS model. 
2. Visibility into end users using tools. 
3. Terminal auto-connect, where we can connect devices from Auvik. 
4. Some sort of an audit. 
5. Backup consultations in the tool, which it maintains. 

It has really eased our life in terms of network operations.

It is improving our network operations in 55 countries, including the US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. 

Auvik automatically updates network topology. Since it automatically updates the topology, we proactively know what is happening in a country or our branch offices. It also alerts us if there is a topology change, e.g., if it discovers anything new in that country. So, it has reduced the number of failures in our operations. We went from being reactive to proactive. So, we are no longer reacting to what is happening and others are doing. This has saved us about two to three hours a day. We used to spend two to three hours every morning checking the firewall and router logs for malicious behavior.

The automation of network mapping enables our junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. The type of views that we have Auvik automatically discovering has helped our operations, as issues get resolved at Level 1 or 2 with the help of the topology. They don't go to Level 3 until they are serious. 

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution. Around three years back, there always used to be a heavy load on Level 3. Nowadays, in a month, there are maximum two tickets that reach Level 3. They all get sorted out in Level 1 and 2.

The most valuable feature is the auditing part. Whenever we are doing any changes, it captures those changes. Date-wise, if we want to refer back to them, we just need to view the date when we did those changes and it will give us a comparison of what has been changed from the last concept. 

The Auvik terminal's service is a value-add to our operations.

It is very user-friendly. It is easy to use, understand, and deploy. My guys have not taken any training from Auvik, but we have learned the systems quite quickly. Because it is user-friendly, you don't need professional training for it.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are awesome. It not only discovers the network, but it also gives you a map by designing how your network will look like in your environment.

Auvik has very good alerting modules. If a connection or device goes down, it alerts us right away. A good part of that alert is it has some sort of intelligence mechanism. For example, if the router or network device has some sort of malicious activity or critical issue, then it alerts us upfront. It will say, "Hey, you have some issues that you might need to check." It alerts us to critical elements before something bad happens. 

They need to improve the reporting system. They still don't have a proper reporting system in Auvik. They have built a dashboard in Power BI using APIs, but they should build some sort of report within Auvik itself. If Auvik fixes the reporting or comes up with a good reporting module, it will change the game.

I have already talked with the CEO of Auvik about this. He agreed that he will be working on getting some reporting systems in Auvik. As of now, they only have reporting via Power BI, and it is an additional cost to get the Power BI licenses. Another drawback, the Power BI reporting is not that accurate and you really have to struggle to get the reports.

I have been using Auvik for three years.

It is a SaaS-based tool. Auvik takes care of their hosting environment. So far, I found this solution to be more stable compared to other tools that we have used on-premises.

The scalability is good. An important thing about Auvik is that this tool is available from anywhere. For example, we are in a pandemic situation today and forced to work from home. Auvik gives us the capability to do our network operations from anywhere. This is one of the important features that I like about Auvik. For the on-premise solution, you have to make sure you are in the company network and have the VPN connected with the resources.

In my department, we have 46 people using it.

We are expanding Auvik into other countries. For now, we have expanded it into Europe and Asia as well as starting to expand it into the US. So, we will have a long journey using Auvik.

Their technical support is good. They need some improvement. They are not quick. Whenever we raised an issue with Auvik, which was two or three times, the technical support was a bit slow in responding to our issues.

We used to manage the firewall and routers manually, connecting to the countries' VPN. Today, we don't need to have them connected. We can just manage it from a single Auvik console. This has really changed our network operations. 

The initial setup is an easy, straightforward process. You just need to download the Auvik collector, and it is just three steps: next, next, and next. Then, it is complete. From the employee perspective, it saves you at least four to five hours. Other tools take people  a working day to deploy one site. Whereas, Auvik takes just a few minutes. The reason for that is they have their automated discovery capabilities, where you just put in your SNMP credentials.

I deployed myself in five minutes.

Three years ago, we used to work out of the office for hours doing maintenance, like patching and upgrading tools. My guys are no longer doing night duty for operations like that. We don't do any maintenance on Auvik because it is done by Auvik.

Compared to other products, Auvik's pricing is more feasible since you get all its features. You pay for licenses on a per network device basis. It monitors hypervisors, but does not bill for that. There are no additional costs, which is something that I like.

We did evaluate a couple of tools, both on-premises and cloud, then we decided to go with Auvik.

Auvik works smoothly compared to other tools. It also discovers the entire network in a respective area, then Auvik maps it automatically and gives you a good topology. This was a key factor in our decision.

Auvik is for any networking department. If you have a very complex network or a lot of devices that need to be monitored, Auvik would be the best fit. Auvik is not for a simple environment. If you have 10 devices or 10 branch/site offices, then Auvik is not a good fit because it will become expensive.

We are still in the testing phase of the TrafficInsights feature, which gives you full visibility into what is happening on your network. Also, the TrafficInsights feature will help you to say where protocols or services are consumed heavily. In the long run, it helps you to optimize your bandwidth based on your country consumption. It gives you a lot of details and integrated traffic insight, which we unfortunately need to hold back on because of data protection laws. 

It doesn't configure out-of-the-box automatically. That is a manual job.

For an enterprise environment, I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.